There's long been a special place in my heart for Kathmandu. When I first got there at the end of 1973 I was 20. I thought I had left college indefinitely but was in fact in the midst of a year off, and I'd been traveling for more than 4 months, much of it through, for me, very alien cultures and landscapes. Across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India before Nepal, all overland, first with a group of people in a WWII troop truck and later by myriad forms of public transportation. Through deserts, jungles, countless towns and villages, and cities like Istanbul, Herat, Kabul, Peshawar, and Amritsar. I was brought to tears by the beauty of the tile work of Isfahan and the death-in-the-streets poverty of Lahore. Amazing, exciting and eye-opening as it all was I rarely felt at fully at ease, and to some degree was always on guard.

But in Kathmandu I thought I had found the proverbial Shangri La. There was a graceful beauty to the city and its people. I loved the steadfast calmness of the Nepalis and the Tibetans, with their beautiful skin and their sweet toughness in the face of hard living, and I loved the architecture, with its finely wrought wooden carvings and profuse ornamentation. Life in the streets seemed so "real" to me, with butchers, ear-wax cleaners, and metal workers plying their trades in public, but without the frenetic in-your-faceness of India. The vegetation was lush and welcoming, animals and smells were everywhere, it was winter and the weather was warm and the sun was strong. And at least on the surface (or perhaps in my 20-year old imagination) the people seemed genuinely happy.

Western travel to Nepal was unusual prior to the 1960s, with most of the mountainous areas restricted, but by the early 1970s Kathmandu had become a magnet for the legions of hippie freak travelers on the Silk Route, either coming east from Europe or going west from Australia and New Zealand. There wasn’t much tourist infrastructure besides what catered to the penny-pinching youth. Only a couple of basic Western style hotels, few paved roads, no streetlights. It took 19 hours to get a phone call through to the States. Tourist lodges offered very basic shared rooms, usually with a communal bathroom, which consisted of a hose with cold water for a shower and a hole in the floor toilet, or you rented a room in someone's house. After spending the first month in a couple of lodges, I rented a private room in a home for the next two months. It had stucco walls with years of soot and was cozy and dark. No electricity after dinner and I remember sitting in my sleeping bag reading, writing, and drawing by candlelight. The "bathroom" ceiling was literally 5 feet high and I couldn't even come close to standing up. I loved it there. The family was warm and welcoming and the rent was $3 a week.

The first three months of 1974 in Kathmandu were magical, at least for a 20-year old American artist-type wanderer with a little spending money. The pie shops that had sprung up to cater to the backpackers had become hangouts for the profusion of writers, artists, and musicians among the travelers. Everyone shared stories and art and music. I was carrying a guitar, as were many others, and spontaneous acoustic jam sessions were the norm. Sometimes Nepalis--kids who worked in the pie shops mostly--would join in with native instruments and somehow it all meshed. I had a regular gig at a small western-run bar in town; I played two evenings a week for about six weeks at the Union Jack Pub for tips and a meal and drinks. Even at the time I realized I had serendipitously stumbled into a wonderful and fleeting cultural moment.

One small food detail I remember vividly: Corn flakes. They were unlike any packaged cereal I had tasted in the States, they absolutely burst with the flavor of corn. It was a taste revelation and it’s viscerally memorable.

Among other favorite memories of that stay in Kathmandu: Regular and numerous visits to the Swayambhunath temple complex, including a couple of new-agey full moon festivals there; and tripping at an unbelievable Hindu religious festival somewhere outside of the city, with something like 200,000 pilgrims who had arrived from all over the Indian subcontinent. Among the mind-boggling things I saw that day was a young boy, maybe 9 or 10, in training to be a sadhu, standing on one leg, his entire body painted white, with two long metal spikes stuck through his protruding tongue, one going sideways and the other vertical; and an older sadhu, seated, being plastered with a mud mixture that hardened quickly, in order to show that he could reduce his breathing to one breath in some number of hours (I don’t remember how many). I didn’t know what or how to think about all I saw.

In late March I got sick. Possibly something in one of those magical pie shops. My digestive tract was under assault and I started to lose weight, much too quickly. I went to a local clinic, where the other patients in the waiting area--all locals--looked near death. I remember one guy with a growth on his neck the size of a softball. I looked healthy compared to everyone else there. But I was misdiagnosed and given the wrong medicine and I got sicker and lost more weight. It became clear that I should head back to the States. Getting back to New York via India and London was an adventure in itself, with an unexpected stop in Damascus, and by the time I got home I had lost 40 pounds. Once treated for amoebic dysentery and food-borne hepatitis I recovered, had a good time gaining the weight back, and eventually continued my adventure by heading out to San Francisco for the summer. Another story.

The next time I was in Kathmandu was with my wife Terry in 1982, when we spent about a month in Nepal. It was still magical, with its glorious temples and stupas and gentle generous people. But it was utterly transformed. Five star hotels, buses filled with Japanese tourists, paved roads, direct dial phones, a major tourist industry. When I tried to find the house in which I had stayed, I not only couldn't find it, I couldn't find the street or even the neighborhood. The entire district had been razed and rebuilt. Greater Nepal had not yet undergone such changes yet. We enjoyed an amazing trek starting in Pokhara, with eight days of glorious walking in the shadow of Machhapuchhre in the Annapurna Range, a 26,000 foot peak. The trek was filled with adventures and wonders and beauty and more stories and my love for the country deepened. I haven't been back since.